Chapter 7
Chapter 7 is all about addiction. It follows an interesting experiment in which a young Bruce Alexander believes that substance addiction is more of a social construct and not a biological one. He tests this theory with the 'Rat Park'. In the rat park Alexander creates an ideal environment for rats and then just a cage. In both environments he feeds the rats morphine water and in the ideal environment the rats resist it, preferring normal water instead. He does several variations of this and shows that addiction is more a social construct, as the caged rats always prefer the morphine water and the rat park rats always prefer normal water. I thought this was interesting, but the rats weren't in just a good environment they were in a ideal one. So its really kind of hard to equate this to human beings. Also there's a bit at the end where the author experiments on herself....it's so stupid! Dear god, if she removed the last page of every chapter, they'd be alot better.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8 is all about memory. Basically this chapter is about a psychologist who thinks that repressed memories are bullshit and that memory is fleeting and unreliable by nature. She proves this by inserting false memories into subjects via only suggestion and watches as the subjects begin describing the false memories more vividly as time goes on. This chapter actually scared me because I don't want people inserting false memories into me, it makes me not take my memories for granted.
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